Antonio Gramsci was a leader of the Communist Party of Italy in the early 20th century. The Fascists and the Communists struggled for control of that country and Benito Mussolini’s Fascists eventually prevailed. A couple years after Mussolini rose to power, Gramsci was imprisoned where he remained for the last ten years of his life. It was during this time that Gramsci formulated a strategy to overthrow western Capitalism:

Gramsci called for a methodical approach to infiltrate, capture, and reform education, the press, the cinema, theatre, the government, and the church, what he called “the long march through the institutions.” He said Capitalism had a cultural hegemony through violence and coercion, both political and economic, but also ideologically, which is where the battle lay.

I will return to his flawed premise that “Capitalism had a cultural hegemony through violence and coercion” later. First, I’ll illuminate how Gramsci’s subversion of Western institutions was implemented because the damage that has followed is still with us today.

The efforts of those that came after Gramsci to foster the ideas of Communism have seeded western institutions with Progressive memes–a meme is the cultural analogue of a biological gene; it’s a concept or idea that traces through a segment of society. Memes are not inherently right or wrong, but rather they are a tool in the battle of ideas. Gramsci’s intellectual progeny cultivated leftist, socialist, progressive, and communist memes in their battle with the classical, western liberal ideals. The vectors for these intellectual viruses vary, but there use against the United States has been routine for quite some time. In 2006 Eric S. Raymond summarized that history in an article titled Gramscian damage:

…ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

…

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did.

The courses in question, Introduction to Labor Studies and Labor Politics and Society, are taught across multiple campuses with a video connection. The university has acknowledged that they are “reviewing the entire unedited tape of the class.” Perhaps the university should release that unedited tape.

The irony of Gramsci’s premise that Capitalism is rooted in violence and coercion is complete as we see the institutions teaching, threatening, and whitewashing violence. To say that Gramsci missed his mark is to understate the obvious.

…one might ponder why hardworking American taxpayers are forced to fund an institution touting a course in how to undermine America, both at home and abroad – including in Iraq and Afghanistan while we’re at war – to the tune of 400 Million dollars.

In an era of tight government finances the process of pruning the Gramscian damage must be aggressive. The private sector alternatives like The Great Courses are modestly priced and often of greater quality. The free, online alternatives are often excellent, too. That is why I believe that Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” may very well burst the education bubble as more and more people flee failed government-funded education for the private sector or free online courses.

The shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona that severely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others was a horrible event. Like everyone, I want the person or persons responsible to be brought to justice as soon as possible.

Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged killer was a fan of couple of ideological books: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. I made a simple diagram to help describe where these books and philosophies are politically.

You’ll notice I didn’t accent the left vs. right, rather the amount of government control based on a particular political philosophy. Many people make the mistake that fascism is a product of the right. Not so. Fascism and Marxism are closely aligned since they are both based on socialism, a society where there is no private property.

Most of you know Dr. Seuss as an author who wrote children’s books, but he did so much more in his career that may surprise you. Dr. Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel, wrote over 60 books, selling over 200 million copies. Seuss graduated from Dartmouth and went to Oxford afterward, although, he left Oxford early without obtaining his intended Doctor of Philosophy, because he fell in love with a girl he met there and married her!

After college, Seuss worked as a humorous writer for popular magazines, and as an ad illustrator for some of America’s largest corporations to support himself and his wife. He also won his first Academy Award for an animated short in 1930.

Seuss was a self-described Democrat, and during the first several years of WWII, he worked with a far left publication in New York City named PM, where he began drawing cartoons in favor of the war against Hitler and Japan. Ideologically, on this issue, Seuss broke with his “America First!”, leftist counterparts, who wanted America to ignore Hitler, and become isolationist regarding the global threat that the Nazis presented (similar to America’s modern left and their response to Islamo-fascism).

During this time, Seuss also created posters for the American Treasury Department and the War Production Board. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and worked as the Commander of the Animation Department of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces. While with the military, Seuss would write Design for Death, a film for which he would win his 2nd Academy Award in 1947.

In his war cartoons, Seuss remained resolute in his position on the war, while lampooning the slow-to-act American political bureaucracy, organizations/politicians that were opposed to the war, and America’s enemies. On the home front, Seuss was especially critical of Charles Lindbergh (Lindbergh’s father was a progressive U.S. Congressman), the famous pilot, who was one of the more influential figures associated with the “America First!”, do-nothing, movement.

The following collection of nearly 400 political cartoons was drawn by Seuss between January 1941 and January 1943. From these cartoons, his position on the war was clear. Here was a Democrat who broke from his contemporaries to do the right thing instead of the safe, expected, or convenient thing – if only modern Democrats were so inclined with respect to the tyrants of today.